In truth, the meek will emerge victors over the world, because, in their struggle for the kingdom of God, they know no weapons except that by which Christ has redeemed the world and vanquished our hearts; because they have cast all other—all natural—weapons from them, countering all enmity and unruly fierceness of evil with the offer of their unshielded heart, which is ready to bleed to death for the sinner’s sake also.

If spoken by the meek, the word of truth which like a sword, severs soul and body, subtly insinuates itself like a breath of love into the innermost recesses of the soul. For the meek is reserved true victory over the world, because it is not they themselves who conquer, but Christ in them and through them.

15

Holy Mercy

MERCY is a specifically divine virtue. If humility is a virtue specifically befitting the creature, so that it can be attributed to God only insofar as He is the God-Man, and that in a merely analogical sense, mercy, inversely, is the divine virtue par excellence, which cannot be attributed to man except by analogy.

Mercy is the condescending, forgiving love of God for sinners

Mercy primarily means the condescending, forgiving love of the absolute Lord, the Epitome of all values, who bends down to us without our deserving it at all. Mercy becomes most manifest in reference to sinful man. None of the Gospel texts impresses mercy on our consciousness so clearly as does the parable of the Prodigal Son. It is love in its particular quality as mercifulness that strikes us in the conduct of the father as he goes to meet his returned son, receives the contrite one with love, and even kills a fatted calf for him.

But the Gospel as a whole breathes the spirit of mercy; for the mercy of God constitutes a central point in Christian Revelation. It upsets the ancient conception of the world, to which a God bending down in love to a creature would have meant an inherent contradiction. It is a stumbling block to the Pharisees, who expect everything from justice founded on the fulfillment of the law. The mercy of God, this primal word of the Gospel, speaks to us movingly from the parable of the Samaritan; it addresses us as a warning in the parable of the master who released his servant from his debt; it overwhelms us in Our Lord’s death on the cross, who, dying, prays for his slayers.

The Gospel calls us to be merciful

Not only does the Gospel reveal to us the mercy of God: it also enjoins upon us to be merciful on our part. Our transformation in Christ requires us to share even this specifically divine virtue. “I will have mercy and not sacrifice,” says Jesus in the house of the publican (Matt. 9:13). The merciful are above all pleasing to God; in fact, our mercifulness is the condition on which we in our turn may find mercy in the eyes of God.